The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Editor Jonathan Strahan opens The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two with a brief introduction in which he identifies a major challenge facing science fiction and fantasy—the fragmentation of the genre. The point is well made. This reviewer tries to read as much short fiction as possible each year; pretty much every genre magazine in the UK and Ireland, no matter how small, gets my cash, as well as most of the major American magazines. And yet turning to the contents pages of this volume, barely two-fifths of the stories were familiar to me—most of the stories within these covers come from original anthologies that I have not read.

Strahan notes that, as a young reader, one of the things that drew him into the genre was the sense that science fiction was an active community that was in continual conversation with itself and its history. New work not only built upon the past but cast new light upon it. In today’s fragmented market—where more is being published but to ever more finely sifted audiences—the opportunities for such communication between writers and readers across the field are increasingly rare. Strahan argues that this kind of collection, which brings together stories from the widest variety of sources and provides a place for the scattered tribes of fandom to come together and read material from outside their comfort zones, is more important than ever.

Of course the other side of that argument might be that those specialist readers come to a generalist collection like this, look at the enormous variety of stories—from Egan and Baxter’s hardest of hard sf to Beagle and Ford’s whimsy or Swanwick and Irvine’s more traditional fantasy—and find themselves recoiling in horror at the weirdness being cast their way. Strahan is certainly right to claim, on the evidence presented just in this volume, that: “These are stories where you can see the centre not holding, the field broadening.” The purpose of this book, he claims, is to try and provide a snapshot of the changing field, “in these days of dissolution it’s more important than ever to understand what is happening in the field.”

It is, of course, possible that this collection is already too late, that the field has already become too divided and that the neatly layered and carefully compartmentalised and market categorised readers of this modern world will simply recoil in horror at the variety of stories offered here and scuttle back into their own precisely defined niches.

There have been those who have expressed disappointment with the story Strahan chose to open this volume. Some of the reviews of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” suggest the first chinks are opening in Ted Chiang’s previously critic-proof armour. It is true that Chiang’s story treads similar ground to some of those he has written before—taking a fantastical setting (in this case, 1001 Nights) but applying to this world the rigorous extrapolations of science fiction. Even if Chiang were the one trick pony that some have started to suggest, and the evidence for such complaints is far from compelling, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” is proof that this trick is so good that there’s still plenty of mileage to be had from repetition.

This story features the interlocking tales of those who have access to a mysterious device, a wormhole that allows travel in time and space, constructed by the alchemist Bashaarat. The story opens with merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas—clearly distraught—being brought before the Caliph of Baghdad and offering “a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.” Fuwaad goes on to tell the loosely interlocking stories of his own interaction with the gate and those of his predecessors, rope-maker Hassan al- Hubbaul who gains his fortune, his wife, Raniya—who secretly educates her husband and saves his life—and the weaver, Ajib ibn Taher, who cannot avoid the fate in which he traps himself. And then there is Fuwaad’s own tale of love and loss that can’t be rescued but might, in some small way, be redeemed.

The theme running through these stories is that no one can escape their fate, that “history” is preserved. But where other writers might deliver a crudely didactic story, Chiang’s writing manages—through the construction of characters that possess emotional depth, credible motivation and human flaws—to create something that is curiously uplifting even as it asserts the essential immutability of our fate.

This is not Chiang’s very best novella but it is, nonetheless, superb—intelligent, engaging, and wise.

Almost as lovely, and every bit as intelligent and wise, Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last and Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French” is, on the surface, a slightly wacky tale about a Californian librarian who slowly becomes French. What starts off as a mild case of Francophilia—a liking for wine and cheese—soon becomes much more serious. Mr. Moskowitz loses the ability to speak and read English—and therefore his job in a university library. Brief fame in America becomes soured when Mr. Moskowitz is revealed as being a rather rude Frenchman, but he is adopted by the French state as a cause celebre and moves to his new homeland.

But even here the transformation doesn’t stop. Mr. Moskowitz becomes too French even for the French—indeed be comes to be a challenge to the very notion of Frenchness. He becomes involved in a debate with the French president and finds the whole French nation wanting.

“You have inhabited France, you have occupied it, you have held it in trust if you like and you have served it varyingly well—but that has not made you French, nor will it, anymore than generations of monkey’s breeding in a lion’s empty cage will become lions.”

In the face of this uber-Frenchness, the president is driven to demand:

“What is it to be French, what does the stupid word mean?”

And a whole nation’s faith in itself is rocked. There is only one path for Mr. Moskowitz; he disappears and becomes an icon—a mythic figure wandering the byways “planting his seed” like a French Johnny Appleseed.

Beagle’s story raises a whole mass of questions about patriotism, about the idea of belonging to a country and about the essentially arbitrary nature of nationalism—a trait which, nevertheless, so many of us identify as a core, defining feature of our personal identity. The nation, which bases so much of its appeal on the myth of stability and permanence, is a fundamentally fickle thing. The only thing certain about borders is that they move (one need only look at Eastern Europe’s transformation in the last fifteen years for proof). But how much more fickle are the people that make a nation? Not only do they change utterly from generation to generation, but as each of us travel through our lives, we encounter revelations and epiphanies that transform us. And yet the myth of permanence persists.

Beagle keeps all this neatly weighted to the earth by the simple suffering of Mr. Moskowitz’s wife—who remains loyal and loving despite her incomprehension at the way her life has been torn asunder and her inability to learn her husband’s new language, let alone adapt to the strange country where she finds herself.

Less cerebral and altogether more riotous is Charles Stross’s “Trunk and Disorderly”—a high-tempo homage to the work of P.G. Wodehouse. A Woosterish post-human protagonist (assisted by his female, super-competent, Jeeves) must rouse himself from his life of excess to rescue his robot girlfriend from the clutches of an evil vizier and, in passing, prevent a coup, while ensuring that no harm comes to his sister’s miniature mammoth. The joke is spread a little thin in places, and there are times when the “life and death” plot jars slightly with the fey characters (and Jeeves doesn’t get to do enough), but this is, nonetheless, an entertaining farce.

Greg Egan’s “Glory” is more problematic. It opens with a jaw-dropping, hard-as-nails sf description of a form of interstellar space flight that provides all the sensawunda any fan could wish for. But the story—of two agents from the Amalgam, a “metacivilisation” that stretches across the galaxy, making contact with the Noudah, a relatively backward but expansionist people, in order to learn the secrets left behind by the Niah, an older species who once inhabited the Noudah’s planet—is less convincing.

The agents split up, implanting themselves in the two most powerful Noudah nations, and set about getting access to the archaeological research the Noudah are conducting into the Niah. In truth, this brash young race are concerned only with the practical and have little interest in their forbearers—whose culture seems to have been obsessed with the most esoteric of mathematics. The Amalgam hope to learn from the Niah’s mastery of mathematics; the ancient race seemed to be on the verge of discovering a mathematical theory of everything.

One of the agents, Joan, reads the work of Noudah philosopher Jaqad, who, inspired by her arrival on this planet, draws a distinction between “spreader” societies like the Noudah and “seeker” societies such as the Niah.

“There were two main routes a culture could take, Jaqad argued, once it satisfied its basic material needs. One was to think and study: to stand back and observe, to seek knowledge and insight from the world around it. The other was to invest its energy in entrenching its good fortune… [The Noudah] were spreaders. Once they had the means, they would plant colonies across the galaxy. They would, Jaqad, was sure create new biospheres, reengineer stars, and even alter space and time to guarantee their survival.”

Inevitably, Joan makes her breakthrough discovery, but she becomes concerned about the impact of her discoveries on the future of the Amalgam. She has come to see her mother culture as an example of Jaqad’s seeker societies, and she fears that the conclusion of their quest to understand all mathematics will send the Amalgam into a spiral. She fears that the Noudah or a race like them might eventually overwhelm the Amalgam.

There are two major problems with “Glory.” The first is a lack of any real dramatic tension. We learn early on the protagonists are safely backed up in their own planet and have no fear of death, and there’s no real physical threat in the story—despite an assassination attempt. More fundamentally, however, Egan’s division of civilisations into two crude groups is unconvincingly reductive and overly simplistic. The idea that a “metacivilisation” might slip neatly inside a single box and then turn up its toes with the slightest push needs much more powerful evidence than is supplied here.

Daryl Gregory’s “Dead Horse Point” is an entirely different type of story again. It is a domestic tale of a gifted mathematician with a condition that causes her to spend longer and longer in a fugue-like state. An old friend/lover receives a call to come quickly—before it is too late—but too late for which character? Moving, spare, and emotionally powerful, “Dead Horse Point” is an excellent story, but it isn’t clear that any particular science fictional or fantastic element is remotely central to the story.

Jeffrey Ford’s “The Dreaming Wind” is set in a land where a transforming wind sweeps through once a year, unleashing strangeness on the small community before moving on. The locals’ relationship with the wind mixes dread with anticipation, but it is only when the weather changes and the dreaming wind fails to come that they realise how much they had relied on the momentary release it allowed and how difficult life is without it. But the children, aided by a parrot, rise to the challenge, and the people find a way to replace what they have lost.

This is a typical piece of work by Ford—wonderfully evocative and bittersweet—and therefore highly recommended.

“The Coat of Stars” is Holly Black’s story of Rafe who, as a teenager, planned to escape from his small-town upbringing with Lyle. But on the night before they are supposed to run away together to the city, Lyle commits suicide, and Rafe is left to make his way alone. Reluctantly returning home from the city for the holidays years later, Rafe is a successful theatrical costume designer. He becomes involved in a family crisis and finds an inner strength which leads him to the belief that he can rescue Lyle who, he is convinced, has gone to live with the faeries. There are echoes of many fairytales and myths in Black’s story, and she juggles the potentially conflicting elements most convincingly.

Ted Kosmatka’s “The Prophet of Flores” is an alternate history where his protagonist becomes a scientist in a world where Darwinism has been defeated and creationism holds sway over the sciences—so that everything from genetics to geology has been remoulded to fit the tenets of the dominant creed. The discovery of some unusual bones on the Indonesian island of Flores sees Kosmatka’s protagonist drawn into a controversy that puts more than scientific orthodoxy in danger.

This is a very strong story—remarkably so, since I believe it was Kosmatka’s first professional sale—that highlights the persistence of science and the scientific method even in the face of institutional power. There’s a lot to like in “The Prophet of Flores”—not least the way Kosmatka ties his alternate reality so closely to our own—but he could have got to the meat of the tale a little more quickly. The story lingered too long on the protagonist’s back story which, though interesting in scene setting, was not essential to the plot.

Alex Irvine’s fantasy—with warriors, dragons, wizards, and palace intrigue and all—“Wizard Six” is the story of Paulus, a mercenary soldier sent to hunt down a renegade wizard before he recruits his “six” and becomes too powerful. The story requires us to forgive the protagonist his slaughter of innocent children and is clogged up with a lot of backstory that, while engaging (the story of how Paulus was turned into a hound and his brother a jester in service of a king they tried to assassinate) only tangentially connects to the plot at hand. “Wizard Six” is unconvincing on a number of levels—characters don’t ring through, the circularity of Paulus’s quest is too neat, the story drags—and it isn’t entirely clear what Irvine was hoping to achieve, a sense not helped when the final confrontation falls embarrassingly flat.

“The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham is one of three stories in this collection to make it onto this year’s Hugo Short Story ballot for best novelette (with Egan’s “Glory” and Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate”), and it richly deserves its place. Olaf Neddlesohn is a cambist—a man who works out the value of exchange rates—and he becomes involved in the debauched life of Lord Iron. The relationship begins with Iron attempting to ruin Olaf’s life with a petty prank, but the cambist soon becomes embroiled in the Lord’s wilder ways, and their relationship becomes more complex as do the questions of exchange upon which Olaf is asked to adjudicate. Olaf’s life will depend on the answers he provides to question such as the relative value of the time of a king and a prisoner or the price of a soul.

This is an excellent story dealing cleverly with economics, ethics, and morality. It presents a variety of challenges to the cambist and the reader, and if the conclusion is a little unlikely—being perhaps a touch too neat—it is nevertheless immensely satisfying. “The Cambist and Lord Iron” is a clever story told in an appealing fashion with a genuinely unique twist on the fantasy universe.

Where Abraham’s story provides unexpected twists, Nancy Kress’s “By Fools Like Me” is an all to familiar tale of postapocalyptic society. Following an environmental disaster, society has (too rapidly and too conveniently) regressed. A new religion has blossomed that trades on fear and hatred of everything that came before the breakdown. Prejudice and ignorance have swept away learning and culture, and trees and nature are worshipped. In this environment, a young girl comes across a package of books from our present—including, of course, Alice in Wonderland (it’s always Alice, isn’t it?)—and persuades her grandmother to read her the stories. Of course disaster ensues, the books are uncovered, and the girl is cast out by her own mother as an all too predictable punishment for her transgressions.

There was too much here that was over-familiar for Kress’s undeniably strong writing to overcome. The story felt as though it were on rails, but not in a good way, with all too predictable consequences flowing from all too predictable weaknesses.

Bruce Sterling is unique. There is no other writer, in any genre, who can so often dispense with mundane matters like plot and character and replace them with didacticism and manifesto-writing and still get away with it. Sterling manages this trick because somewhere inside his head an ideas factory is constantly exploding and lighting up the road to the future.

In “Kiosk,” Sterling tells the story of Borislav, a very small businessman—he runs a kiosk in some rundown part of Eastern Europe after a crisis has shattered the traditional economy. Borislav prospers thanks to the capabilities of the dodgy fabrikator he has installed in his little kiosk and his willingness to be lead by the demands of his customers. But when an EU researcher descends on Borislav’s little empire and buys not only his stock but his fabricator and his kiosk, a chain of events is set in train that will involve Borislav with a radical new technology and bring him into the orbit of crimelords, revolutionaries, and politicians and lead to a new social order.

Sterling’s purpose with “Kiosk” is not really to give us a story about specific people; the setting remains sketched, the characters sparsely filled in and are useful only to the extent that they allow him to expound on his theories of social reform, market power, and technological capability. That it remains readable as a piece of fiction is a testament to Sterling’s energy and skill and the remarkable fecundity of his mind. This is a fascinating read, full of huge ideas and exciting extrapolation, without necessarily being a fascinating story.

“Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss could hardly be more different from Sterling’s story. This is a gently lyrical fantasy about an Empress, dragons, beautiful girls, and wistful poets. Remixing the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Goss tells the story of Kamora—the very clever and beautiful niece of Alem Das, who makes fine musical instruments from dragons’ whiskers. Each night, Kamora entertains the Empress with the most beautiful songs ever sung. But the singer has fallen in love with the dragon on the mountain and wishes to be free to be with him. The Empress will only release her on the condition that she finds someone who is as entertaining as Kamora to replace her—and so enters, into a strangely familiar land—the infamously slow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—snatched from his own time to wander nightly with the Empress.

There’s no denying the sweetness of this story or the sharp writing that underpins it, but it would, I think, have been better served with a little more spice and a little more emotional impact. As it is, intelligent though Goss’s writing is, one is left with a slight sense of distance from the characters and the text.

Neil Gaiman’s “The Witch’s Headstone” is a typically dark children’s story by this author, featuring Bod, a little boy who lives in a graveyard and makes friend with the spirit of a witch buried in nearby unconsecrated ground. Bod undertakes a mission to give the witch a headstone, which involves him stealing a treasure from an ancient grave and trying to sell it to an unscrupulous antiques dealer and getting into serious trouble.

“The Witch’s Headstone” isn’t Gaiman at his very best—it’s cute and affecting and nicely written—but perhaps it feels a little light coming from a writer who so often delivers more satisfyingly complex work.

Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact” is a classic science fiction story that might have been written at any time in the last seventy years (and probably any time in the next seventy years) and would have deserved its place in a best of collection in any of those years. The premise is pure hard sf—the universe is undergoing a new wave of expansion and is going dark as particles at the most fundamental level are flung apart, and, at the same time, the sky is, at last, alight with messages from distant alien civilisations—but no one can decode what they are saying.

As the end approaches, a female scientist—who helped identify the oncoming wave of destruction—considers gardening, the alien messages, and physics with her mother. The scale and chilly immensity of “Last Contact” are typically Baxterian, as is the foregrounding of adult children’s relationships with their parents, and the story has echoes of classics that have gone before. Despite these familiar elements, the story feels fresh, and the final passages are very powerful.

The award for best title in this collection, without doubt, goes to Ken MacLeod for “Jesus Christ, Reanimator”—a title guaranteed to get the hackles rising on god-botherers everywhere. But the story itself—following the second coming of a rather likeable, liberal Jesus, who really just wishes people could get along—is unlikely to offend many people at all.

The story is told from the point of view of a journalist who follows the slightly bewildered messiah as he runs into scepticism, hostility, and apparent failure in his attempt to reintroduce people to the truth about his teachings. Jesus comes across as a nice guy, disappointed at the way he has been interpreted by history and misrepresented by his followers. This Jesus is a little mild—hardly the man who tossed the money-lenders and traders out of the temple and warned the rich men about the tough task they faced getting into heaven—but he manages to sneak his life-changing message under the guard of even the cynical reporter.

“Jesus Christ, Reanimator” has some funny moments—Jesus gets a particularly hard time from the Israeli armed forces—but I was expecting MacLeod to deliver a tale with more passion (sorry). Still, as the narrator discovers (on his way to becoming a new evangelist), this returning Jesus might just succeed in sneaking his revolutionary ideas beneath your defences without you evening noticing.

Susan Palwick’s “Sorrel’s Heart” is probably the weakest story in this collection. The background is familiar; following some disaster, mutant outcasts are hounded by the pure-blooded. Two travellers meet—one is Sorrel, a mutant girl with her heart on the outside (which is painfully crude symbolism for the fact that she’s also very empathic), while the other is Quartz, a physically normal man who gets pleasure from causing pain. They strike a deal: Quartz will stop hurting people and things if Sorrel will listen to his confessions and suffer for him. On the run from normal society, they fall in love, Sorrel becomes pregnant, and they decide to go to the mountains, where they’ve heard there might be a safe place for mutants. At a moment of crisis, they meet another woman, Quartz strikes out, dooming Sorrel and finding himself alone with their child amongst the “normals.”

The symbolism here is too thickly laid on, the moralising is too clompingly heavy, and the setting too familiar for this story to be truly effective. The relationship between Sorrel and Quartz is potentially interesting, but the story drags them along a very conventional route that robs the drama of their lives of emotional spark.

“Urdumheim” by Michael Swanwick tells of a race of godlike beings who bring order to the world but who find their utopia invaded by monstrous, word-stealing and corrupting Urdumheim. These creatures go to war with the gods, despoiling the Earth, and for the first time, death comes to the world. The protagonist becomes a tool to assassinate the leader of the gods, Nimrod.

The fundamental problem with using gods as characters in stories is that the author is always struggling to overcome the fact that these characters are archetypes, not human. This is made worse by the bestial nature of the Urdumheim. No one here is sympathetic, and the stakes being fought for (paradise or bust) are too esoteric.

Swanwick tries hard but fails to square the circle. The story doesn’t succeed, and, although by no means the longest story in the collection, “Urdumheim” drags. That said, the method Nimrod devises to ensure the Urdumheim cannot rise again is satisfyingly clever, making the point that communication, and particularly language, is essential in separating man from beast.

“Holiday” by M. Rickert is the most disturbing story in this collection. A young man is attempting to write about his childhood, which was blighted by an abusive father. He finds himself visited by the ghost of a young girl, Holiday, who was murdered. The ghosts of more and more children begin to visit the protagonist, and both he and the reader are drawn more and more deeply into a dark place where the young man tries to please the children but also to assuage some urge he cannot quite grasp. The story’s finale, in which the young man has his “epiphany,” is certainly the creepiest thing I’ve read this year.

Rickert takes a highly controversial subject matter and manages to give the reader a unique perspective on it by very artfully persuading us to visit somewhere many of us have no desire to tread. Strongly written with both intelligence and sensitivity, “Holiday” works as both a ghost story and a psychological study of an increasingly disturbed young man for whom raking over the past has released long trapped demons. Not, perhaps, a story one might wish to revisit for fun, “Holiday” is creepy, frightening stuff.

In Tony Daniel’s “The Valley of the Gardens,” as the plot unfolds, we learn that the environment has been reconfigured to make it a thinking entity capable of shaping those living above and of solving the problem of what to do about hordes of invading “aliens.” The problem here is that I wasn’t blown away by the author’s clever writing but instead wondered whether the real answer shouldn’t have been “42.” I’m sure Tony Daniels’s idea of a planet created to solve a problem owes nothing to Douglas Adams, but “The Valley of the Gardens” has other problems. Essentially, in what should be a century-spanning love story, the central relationships are too sketchily drawn to support the sfnal edifice he’s built around the human drama.

“Winter’s Wife” by Elizabeth Hand is an ecological fantasy drawing on Icelandic myth. Young Justin is brought to the wilds by his hippy mother, and they survive in the harsh landscape only thanks to the intervention of Winter—who befriends the fatherless boy. Winter marries a mysterious Icelandic woman, and when the forest in which they live is threatened by a crass and greedy businessman, Winter’s wife reveals her true nature.

The writing in “Winter’s Wife” is slick and strong, but the story feels unbalanced. Too much time is devoted to introducing everyone and talking about woodcarving and tree cutting so that it feels like we’re half way through the story before Winter’s wife makes an actual appearance and three-quarters of the way through before anything actually relevant to “the plot” is uncovered. And the “solution” to Winter and Justin’s problem is delivered without any sense of threat or potential repercussions.

Chris Roberson has been turning out a number of excellent stories in his Celestial Empire series—an alternate history where China is established as the world’s dominant power—and “The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small” is one of the best. Cao Wen is a functionary attempting to question Ling Xuan, a long-term prisoner who, in the past, had served as a civil servant on a fact-finding mission to the people of Mexica. Cao Wen’s purpose is to identify military weaknesses which the empire might exploit. Ling Xuan is wise, but he procrastinates, dragging out his encounters with Cao Wen, drip-feeding him info in return for concessions.

This world is deep and rich, and the confrontation between Cao Wen and Ling Xuan is commendably handled. Ling is a particularly nicely realised character—both fundamentally powerless and yet utterly unbroken by his years of imprisonment and maltreatment. A lesser man might be bitter, but Ling knows that the secret to victory both for himself and for the Middle Kingdom is freedom of thought.

Elizabeth Bear’s “Orm the Beautiful” is a tale about the last dragon who, faced with extinction and the threat that the stories and music of his kind will be lost forever, comes to terms with the modern world in spectacular fashion. This is not your usual dragon, and this is not your usual dragon story. In a shock move, it appears that Elizabeth Bear has found a way to bring fantasy’s most overworked and dried out stereotype—the noble dragon—into the twenty-first century in a way that manages to be surprising, delightful, and even moving.

The final entry in this anthology is Kelly Link’s “The Constable of Abal” in which Ozma and her daughter, Zilla, have mystical powers—they see ghosts—and have been using their talents to scam the wealthy women of the city of Abal. As the story opens, however, they are forced to flee the city and, in so doing, kill the titular constable, whose ghost Zilla keeps with her, despite orders from her mother. Out of Abal, and with their manservant killed, a strange change comes over Ozma, and she leads them from the high-living comfort of Abal to a life as servants of a strange old woman in the provincial town of Brid. Ozma is looking for something, but she can’t remember what it is; Zilla is outraged by her new impoverishment and begins to turn into a boy, and the old woman helps them uncover the secrets about themselves.

Link has that happy knack of making the fantastic entirely plausible and of sketching out extraordinary things in a way that makes them seem normal without diminishing their lustre. “The Constable of Abal” is a story by a mature writer at the top of her powers

Are the stories in this collection the best science fiction and fantasy published in 2007? This reviewer has no idea—though there are stories I would have included that aren’t here (replacing Greg Egan’s “Glory” with the author’s own, and superior, “Dark Integers,” for example) but there is no denying that there are some excellent stories within its pages. The stories by Chiang, Beagle, Black, Abraham, Stirling, Baxter, Rickert, Roberson, and Bear stand out in the memory as excellent examples of authors using the short form in exciting, powerful, and sometimes innovative ways. Only the Palwick left me totally cold.

And if Strahan’s goal was to encourage a science fiction fan to read material outside that which they might come across normally—to step out of their increasingly narrow niches and experience the wider extents of the genre—then this collection might succeed. There’s no denying the scope of the stories included here, reflecting the breadth of what we more or less comfortably encompass under the genre heading in the modern era.

The problem is that the general reader might find the material too diverse. The sheer breadth of the stories presented here means that some readers are going to find that there are considerable numbers of stories from sub-genres that don’t really interest them. For this reviewer, there were not enough of what I would classify as science fiction stories in this volume (only nine of twenty-four)—although I’ll concede the quality of many of the fantasy stories was very high. Even so, faced with a choice between this volume, mixing fantasy and science fiction, and one of the other collections focusing just on science fiction, and asked to spend my own money, I don’t think that this is the one I’d choose.

Publisher: Night Shade Books
Price: $13.57
Trade Paperback: 500 pages
ISBN: 1597801240